Building KindaSeen with FastAPI, Next.js, and PostgreSQL

“Did We Already Watch This?” — Building KindaSeen with FastAPI and Next.js A few months ago, my friends and I kept running into the same question whenever we talked about movies, dramas, anime, or variety shows: “Did we already watch this before?” Sometimes we remembered the title but forgot whether we had finished it. Other times, we completely forgot we had already seen it at all. That simple problem inspired me to build KindaSeen, a full-stack personal media repository designed to help users track and organize the media they’ve consumed in one centralized platform. The goal of the project was not only to create a useful application, but also to gain hands-on experience building a real-world full-stack system with modern web technologies. What KindaSeen Currently Supports User authentication with Supabase CRUD operations for personal media records TMDB-powered search functionality Watchlist system Favorites system Persistent PostgreSQL storage Dockerized backend deployment Separate frontend/backend deployment workflow Tech Stack Frontend Next.js React Tailwind CSS Shadcn/ui Vercel deployment Backend FastAPI PostgreSQL Docker Render deployment External Services Supabase Authentication TMDB API integration One of the main goals of this project was to simulate a more realistic production workflow by using a decoupled frontend/backend architecture instead of building everything inside a single monolithic application. In this article, I’ll share: Why I chose this architecture How I integrated TMDB into the application Challenges I faced during deployment What I Learned From Building KindaSeen Why I Chose This Architecture Instead of building a monolith using Next.js API routes, I decided to decouple the application into a Next.js frontend and a FastAPI backend. This decision was driven by three main factors: AI Compatibility & Future Proofing : While researching the job market, I noticed that most companies building AI products heavily rely on Python. By choosing FastA